CRS Clearwater was attended by an impassioned and enthusiastic group of some of the customer experience (CX) industry’s best and brightest, and the event featured more than a dozen sessions including keynote presentations, discussion panels, and informative breakout sessions and workshops, as well as ample opportunity for professional networking and socializing.

If you were able to join us for this special event, you know exactly how valuable these sessions were. But if you were not able to attend, now’s your chance to catch up on the conversation with the following keynote session synopses, along with a dozen or so key takeaways.

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How Beachbody Became a Digital-First Company

Presented By: Todd Montgomery, Executive Vice President, The Beachbody Company

Synopsis:

Beginning in 2014, Todd Montgomery and team began a journey of robust transformation. This change has since yielded a more responsive, more consistent customer care experience, along with improved performance across several key metrics like average speed of answer, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and Net Promoter Score (NPS). All while lowering costs, improving the agent experience, and creating greater internal accountability.  Not to mention this was all accomplished amid a global pandemic.

Todd’s keynote kickoff told a compelling story about the value of investing in technologies like self-service solutions and better agent tools, while always maintaining a focus on the customer experience. Through thoughtful scaling, careful and ongoing assessment, and a data-driven, results-minded approach, Todd and team are already checking the box on many objectives, while constantly assessing and looking toward what’s next.

Key Takeaways:

• Prioritize identifying and tackling pain points, focusing on those things that drive the most volume
• Invest in areas that allow you to leverage your program data (including Voice of the Customer) to create more efficient experiences for customers
• Implement and experiment with tools and solutions that can simultaneously automate and improve the customer experience

How Fanatics Activated Its CX Data Superpowers

Presented By: Carolyne Truelove, Head of Global Fan Experience, Fanatics

Synopsis:

As the ultimate one-stop sports fan destination with a database of more than 80 million global customers, the Fanatics brand is working with a wealth of data, and actively using it to field a team of data superheroes. Together, this team is united with a shared goal of improving the customer experience right across the enterprise. Faithfully following where the data leads has already unleashed many performance and cost improvement victories, including steadily decreasing Contacts Per Order, fewer escalations, and lower costs.

By focusing on the right metrics, harnessing data to better understand the customer, and tirelessly championing the cause in a way that informs and unites, a data-driven strategy can produce profound results. By approaching CX with a fan’s passion, Carolyne and team are turning data insights into heroic moments — all in the spirit of a mission to serve.

Key Takeaways:

• Data is a powerful mover of meaningful change when leveraged correctly and consistently, and the data always tells a story when seeking investment and support
• Feedback is a gift that should be both treasured and acted upon
• Strong internal partnerships and centralized metrics are the keys to unlocking support for not only a single powerful superhero, but a powerful super team

Embracing a Commitment to Employee Success

Presented By: Teresa Ignacio, Vice President, Client Care Managed Services, Visa

Presented By: Mike Jones, Senior Director – Customer Care, The Home Depot

Synopsis:

Teresa Ignacio and Mike Jones lit up the stage, evangelizing the critical importance of creating better employee experiences. Although each told a slightly different story, the themes remained the same. The employee experience was nothing short of a rallying point, one for effective deployment of improvement efforts — the type that can have a multiplicative effect. By supporting a drive for greater employee success, each leader demonstrated how their efforts were empowering an ingredient essential in the recipe for customer success.

The world has undergone significant change, and contact center agents have been asked to handle challenges unimaginable only a couple of years ago. While the foundations of the past may have been a good starting point, they weren’t designed to address all the employee needs that have arisen in our new normal. Contact centers have been impacted in ways large and small, and forward-thinking companies have responded with greater flexibility, awareness, and dedication to their most important asset — their people.

Key Takeaways:

• The employee experience is multifaceted … many critical areas need to be addressed like career development, engagement, and work environment
• Investing in employees (and the tools and technologies that support employees) is one of the single best investments that can be made in the CX space
• Leadership approach, processes, and policies must all be flexible enough to change with the times and evolving consumer expectations

CX Transformation Secret Revealed: The Hero Is Your Customer!

Presented By: Jen Johnson, Senior Vice President of Business Transformation, Frontier

Synopsis:

Transformation isn’t easy, but it’s almost always essential. And if done correctly, the rewards go far beyond the bottom line. Frontier has undergone many transformations in its nearly 90-year history. But its most recent transformation has led Frontier toward a path of truly putting the customer first, taking center stage in everything the organization does.

Jen shares her thoughts on the compelling narrative of “the customer as the hero,” and how such an approach inevitably leads to positive experiences for Frontier customers. Naturally, it’s a long-term investment, and not necessarily an easy sell. But with the help of true CX champions, alignment up and down the organization, perseverance, and a common language of “speaking customer,” a cultural shift isn’t only possible, it’s inevitable.

Key Takeaways:

• Every customer is a mighty advocate, just needing the right experience to become activated
• Organizational alignment is a massive enabler in achieving transformational success
• The process is not always easy, and it takes some honest self-reflection to get there

Our Next Event Is Closer Than You Might Think

Catching up on an event by reading these sorts of post-event blog posts might be the next best thing to attending, but it’s a far cry from the experience of attending an Execs In the Know CRS event. That’s why we invite you to consider joining us during our next CRS event, taking place in Coronado, California, October 24–26, 2022.

To learn more about CRS Coronado, or register for this highly anticipated event, take a moment to visit us at the CRS Coronado web page.

The post It’s A Wrap: Insights from Four CRS Clearwater Keynote Presentations appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Join Jeff Fettes, CEO of Laivly, on March 29 at Execs In The Know’s Customer Response Summit (CRS), as he leads an engaging discussion on how nextgen technology, including agent assist tools and real-time AI oversight, can help contact centers take a proactive approach to quality assurance.

Coaching and Development as QA

How does your contact center approach QA? If you’re like most, team leaders review calls after the fact and coach agents on what went right and what could be improved. At this point, the damage has already been done, and coaching is an attempt to prevent the same mistake from happening again.

Coaching and development serve an important purpose for agents, leaders, and brands. However, as a means of QA—especially as the only means—this reactive approach is inefficient. Attended automation tools allow for real-time course correction, which can be reinforced through in-person coaching.

Proactive QA through Ongoing Training

Depending on the program, newly hired agents face weeks of classroom training, often followed by a period of highly supported, extensively coached live training on the floor. Some programs follow this “nesting” period with even more classroom training. In any case, the transition from trainee to live agent is uncomfortable. Attrition rates reflect this, as agents find themselves struggling to remember everything they learned—not just the complex policies or product knowledge, but where to find this information and how to navigate the CRM and other programs.

Even seasoned agents forget key elements of their training or develop bad habits to boost productivity. Attended AI can provide ongoing training for all agents by guiding them through workflows, suggesting knowledge base articles or appropriate next steps, and automating repetitive or low-value tasks.

Remote and Work-From-Home QA Challenges

If in-person training and coaching are already challenging, how do you set up agents for success when they are working remotely? Agents may feel isolated, amplifying the discomfort of transitioning out of training. Remote work also removes a level of oversight, which opens the door to more unintentional—or intentional—errors.

With the right attended automation technology, brands can protect themselves from fraud without encroaching on an agent’s sense of autonomy. On the contrary; an attended automation platform can help a WFH agent feel supported and empowered while providing noninvasive yet ironclad oversight. The outcome? Happier agents and dramatically lower invalid expenses.

How Digital QA Delivers Proactive Solutions

Nextgen technology, such as Laivly’s platform-agnostic agent assist tools, takes QA out of arrears and puts it onto the agent’s desktop in real time. Digital QA delivers notable improvements across virtually all KPIs and metrics, including:

• Average handle time (AHT)
• Appeasement and concession accuracy
• Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT)
• Speed-to-green and average training time
• Policy enforcement and escalations

Just as self-service can’t replace a live customer service agent for everything, digital QA works best when paired with empathetic human coaching and nuanced resolutions. But together, this evolution of proactive quality assurance stands to truly change the game.

Guest post written by Laivly. Learn more about the evolution of digital QA and how contact centers can take a more proactive approach to quality assurance with Jeff Fettes, CEO of Laivly. Check out his Customer Shop Talk session on March 29 at Execs In The Know’s Customer Response Summit (CRS) in Clearwater, FL.

The post The Evolution of Real-Time Digital QA appeared first on Execs In The Know.

If you have yet to tune in to the Fall 2021 CRS virtual event, you can watch many sessions on-demand.
Registration is simple, free, and it takes only a minute to get immediate online access to this insightful content.

To help highlight some of the amazing ideas that came out of these sessions, we’ve created a five-part blog series — each focusing on a particular keynote session. In Part 5, we highlight Michael Baker’s turnaround story at UnitedHealth Group, one that puts people and compassion at the center of change..

The Business Case for Compassion

Michael Baker
COO UnitedHeathcare Provider Operations
UnitedHealth Group

Click to sign in or register to watch Michael’s Fall 2021 CRS presentation.

To say UnitedHealth Group has undergone a turnaround is perhaps a bit of an understatement. The company underwent a “worst to first” evolution by every meaningful measure. During this session, Michael shares how UnitedHealth Group made a conscious effort to put people and compassion at the center of an ambitious remake of the company’s customer service operations. The result has been a dynamic shift in not only the customer experience, but also a rising opinion of the brand among both industry watchers and customers alike. Here are some of the most notable learnings from Michael’s journey:

1. Compassion and Tenacity Can Move Mountains

When looking to place an individual as an advocate for your customer, consider compassion and tenacity as top factors. While it’s important to have well-rounded call center skills, the fact of the matter is individuals who are both compassionate and tenacious can connect with customers in unique ways, creating customer experiences that have the power to literally shift brand perception.

2. Rethink Measurements and Goals

With compassion as a core purpose, it becomes counterproductive to focus on some traditional measures of productivity, like average handle time (AHT). Such measures shouldn’t be a distraction when the focus is on compassion. Instead, attention should be given to the overall experience, including an agent’s ability to truly listen and guide customers to a workable solution regardless of what it takes, or how long it takes. Compassion can’t be rushed.

3. Moments of Compassion Build Trust

When agents take the time to listen and express compassion for a customer and their issue much, in the same way, they might treat family, something special happens. Customers realize they’ve got an advocate, a true advocate. And this builds trust in a very special way. Trust matters, especially when it comes to something as important as health, and that trust is a bridge to many things.

4. Keep It Authentic

Brands that can keep it authentic often have an edge. UnitedHealthcare Group keeps it authentic with the use of handwritten cards from agents to customers. It’s small but heartfelt, and it can mean a lot to the person on the receiving end.

5. No CX Journey Ever Has an End

No matter how far a company has come on evolving its customer care operations, there’s always more to be done. People can get better, technology can evolve, and the next great process change is just a spark of inspiration away. As you explore where priorities should go next, always keep the customer at the center of every initiative, and always ask, “Will this improve the experience?”

The power of the human-to-human connection can not be overestimated. If you’re wondering how your company can make a stronger emotional connection with customers, you should know that the Fall 2021 CRS event featured a panel discussion around creating empathy, another powerful avenue for building trust.

Be sure to check it out:
Creating Empathy and Eliminating Frustration on the Path from Automation to Live Engagement

The post Fall 2021 CRS & Five Key Takeaways from Five Keynotes — Part 5: UnitedHealth Group appeared first on Execs In The Know.

CRS — Spring 2021’s general sessions can be viewed in their entirety on-demand with one quick, simple registration that’s totally free for corporate viewers.

In this blog post, we touch on the key insights from each of these four panels. Although readers should take the time to view each of these panels (they are well worth the time), here are a few highlights that capture the essence of each panel.

The Importance of Research to the Modern CX Executive 

Host/Sponsor:
Fancy Mills, COPC Inc.

Panelists:
Daniel Mendez Costabel, Microsoft
Brandon Linton, Marriott
China Scroggins, Forever 21

No doubt, industry research can be a key piece of the puzzle when building the case for a new initiative, a critical process change, or the development of a strategic roadmap. But what type of research should customer experience (CX) leaders be looking for, and how should they incorporate this research into their improvement efforts?

Seek Out Research That Is Actionable — There’s a lot of research out there, so CX leaders need to ask themselves, “Is this research interesting, or actionable.” Look for research that can contribute to actions that have an impact.

Understand Consumer Behavior — Some of the most valuable research (and hard to get at) reveals something about consumer behavior, especially changing behavior. Trending data can be valuable when it comes to consumer-based research where it can be used to help evolve customer personas and profiles.

Other Types of Valuable Research — In addition to research that drives consumer insights, research that provides real-time (or near real-time) data, research with granularity (perhaps by region, for instance), or research that contains specific examples can be of great value. Benchmarking research can also be useful for understanding core metrics.

Using Research — Research is most valuable when used in combination with program data — things like Voice of the Customer data, and even Voice of the Employee data. This helps create greater relevancy for different types of research. One of the most effective ways to use research is as an agent of change, and to garner support from leadership for new investments and initiatives.

Doing Contact Center Quality Assurance the Right Way

Host/Sponsor:
Chris Vodola, Stella Connect by Medallia

Panelists:
Chris Purpura, Neiman Marcus
Kelley Cutforth, Chegg
Emily Estes, Thumbtack
Sagarika Prusty, Instacart

Quality Assurance (QA) is a critical part of any successful CX program, but an important question should always be, “Are we doing QA the right way?” In other words, program managers should be asking themselves whether or not they have the right questions on the QA form, and whether or not the focus is on the things that matter most.

Establish A Relationship Between QA and CSAT — If done right, an improvement in QA scores should, over time, be reflected by an improvement in CSAT scores. If that’s not the case, the QA form might not be focused on all of the things that matter most to customers.

Quality Is About More Than Agent Behavior — An effective QA program goes beyond agent actions, identifying things like gaps in process, policy, or tools sets. Are there common pain points or pitfalls? What could reduce agent effort? These are some of the questions QA should also aim at answering.

Don’t Sacrifice the Good for the Perfect — No QA program is ever going to be perfect, so don’t be afraid to tweak, test, and adjust as needed. Use QA to understand overall program performance, empower agents, and improve the overall experience, for both customers and employees.

Create an Active QA Program — An Active QA program tightens the time between call reviews and coaching sessions, and is also quicker to feed company-wide insights back into the organization. Active QA programs are much better at creating effective change, both for agent and organizational performance.

Re-Working Digital CX: A Reality Check with Top Brands

Host/Sponsor:
Kevin Bottoms, TELUS International

Panelists:
Deserie Dulaney, Compass
Jason Clement, CVS Health
John Riordan, Shopify

During the pandemic, companies have greatly accelerated digital adoption, especially when it comes to customer interactions. But are digital deployments going as planned? Taking a step back, are digital deployments being properly evaluated and measured? This is especially important as new iterations and initiatives are planned.

Is Digital Working Right — Digital deployments should be geared toward one end goal — simplifying complexity for the end-user. Whether the digital solution is employee-facing or customer-facing, it should be contributing to an improved experience, which usually means making things easier. Digital solutions need to be seamless, quick, easy-to-use, and accurate.

Consumers Want Digital — Not only do consumers want digital solutions (and are willing to embrace them), they expect them because that’s the experience they are already having with leading brands. If done right, digital solutions can enable and empower customers.

What to Focus On — If the focus of a digital solution is cost, the solution isn’t going to perform the way it should. The focus should be on the overall experience. What problem does this solution solve, and what is the impact on the experience? What about feedback? Is the solution validated in the eyes of customers?

Digital Is a Team Sport — The pandemic helped remove barriers like bureaucracy and process, fast-tracking many solutions out of necessity. This shows how quickly things can be accomplished under a unified banner. Brands can accelerate efforts by creating “Digitization Champions” across business groups, all working toward finding opportunities for greater efficiency and an improved experience through digitization and automation.

Customer Feedback: 4 Fresh Practices for Unlocking Employee Potential

Host/Sponsor:
Ellie Dubbs, Concentrix

Panelists:
Sandra Diggs-Miller, Entergy
Jim Gallagher, Nordstrom
Karine Poulin, Air Canada

Engaged employees, those who are integrated into the CX effort, are likely to improve their performance twice as fast as those who are not fully engaged. But what’s the best way to engage employees and keep them engaged? Furthermore, how can a brand best maintain, share, and celebrate that engagement?

Listen to Employees — Listening to employees is about more than a quarterly survey. Brands that truly listen to their employees have made a cultural commitment, and there are usually many avenues for sharing beyond surveys, including one-on-one time with leaders, internal focus groups, polls, and opportunities to provide anonymous feedback.

Tell Stories and Reward Success — Stories are powerful motivators, and they can add context and flavor to whatever topic is at hand. When combined with reward and recognition activities, stories can drive behaviors in a big way. Brands that successfully engage employees take the time to recognize and reward, bringing metrics to life.

Engage as a Wider Team — Each part of the organization is important, so successes and engagement should be occurring across business units where appropriate. When operations, product development, marketing, and other teams can come together to engage with one another, not only do individuals benefit but overall company culture is also strengthened, especially if that culture embraces catching people doing great things.

Count on Leadership and Partners — Reward and recognition are more powerful the more buy-in it has. Leaders and partners can be some of the biggest advocates and boosters for creating positive engagement, they just need to be invited to participate. Their participation will not only mean a lot to employees, but their involvement is often essential in creating success.
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Getting a few session highlights is one thing — but seeing the discussion for yourself is all the better. To see any of these panels on-demand, or any of the other amazing sessions from CRS — Spring 2021, take a moment to register and check out all the action for yourself.

The post Highlights from Four Powerful Panels During CRS — Spring 2021 appeared first on Execs In The Know.

For QA managers looking to rate their team’s performance and ensure their QA program is optimized to drive important customer experience KPIs like customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and more, we’re outlining the five most important questions you need to keep in mind when measuring the success of your QA program.

By looking at your quality assurance program through the lens of these questions, you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of your program, hold your QA team and processes accountable, and meet customer expectations.

After all, most customers today believe great customer experiences start with great interactions with employees. Meanwhile, less than half (38%) of U.S. consumers say the employees they engage with are meeting their needs.

5 Considerations to Run a Successful Quality Assurance Program

#1: How ‘rich’ is your internal feedback?

Too often when QA reviews are conducted, results get shared with agents without obvious next steps. A high QA score doesn’t mean much to your agent if they don’t know why their interactions are being scored well.

Similarly, a low QA score without any additional insight can ultimately be detrimental to an agent’s performance. After all, if they’re doing to be scored low and not told how to improve, why bother?

The best QA reviews provide both quantitative scores and qualitative feedback, with specific details that provide context beyond just the number or rating, so employees understand their performance and the specific actions they can take to improve, if needed.

When considering how ‘rich’ your internal feedback is, consider how detailed you can get when doing QA reviews. Do you have the ability to pinpoint specific moments in each call, chat, or email exchange and annotate them with best practices? Can you leave comments on interactions more broadly that speak to the overall performance of the agent?

Indeed, the more meaningful the feedback, the more actionable it becomes for your agents and the more clear direction they have for how to handle similar situations as they arise.

#2: How frequently are you performing QA reviews?

If you want to know how many reviews each team member is getting each week, you need to turn the frequency of QA reviews into a trackable KPI.

Frequency is important because QA programs fail to live up to their promise of helping companies deliver on customer centricity when there’s insufficient data provided.

Jennifer Grim, Director of Customer Service at UncommonGoods, an online marketplace connecting makers and their creations with individuals looking for truly special goods, explained that infrequent QA audits can be misleading.

When QA team leaders have only a handful of random interactions to review each week, they won’t get a clear picture of individual agents’ overall performance, how the team as a whole is doing, and where there are opportunities to provide more training and address underlying and recurring customer questions, concerns, and issues.

Before partnering with Stella Connect, experience-booking platform Peek.com managed to audit about 4 to 4.5 percent of its service exchanges, leaving the team with an incomplete snapshot of customer service performance.

Within two months of launching Stella Connect’s QA tool, the company was able to drive a 5X increase in QA audit efficiency to review up to 22% of interactions and increase their CSAT scores from 3.0 to 3.25, without growing the QA team.

Is your QA program moving the needle to drive customer satisfaction and agent improvement? Download our Guide to Doing Contact Center QA The Right Way for insight into building a streamlined, actionable QA program.

#3: How long is the turnaround time for internal quality reviews?

To run a successful quality assurance program, it’s critical to know how long it’s taking between the completion of a given customer interaction, and when a QA review of the conversation makes its way back to the front-line team member involved.

The fresher the feedback, the better, and for good reason. The sooner it’s delivered, the sooner your agents can feel the boost from the positive feedback they receive and begin self-correcting based on pointers they get when needed.

While more than 90% of Stella Connect clients conduct some type of customer service QA, historically these QA audits have been extremely manual and time-consuming.

Often, agents have had to wait weeks or even until the end of the month to receive feedback, insights about their performance, and guidance on how to improve. These kinds of delays in audits and information sharing leave agents without consistent support. And that, in turn, can prevent brands from delivering consistent customer experiences.

Agents who may have the wrong information about a product or policy may continue to—unknowingly—share the wrong information with customers. Over time, this has the potential to negatively impact the customer experience, brand reputation, and agent morale.

Since Stella Connect client SmartPak began using our real-time QA software, the equine retailer is now able to review customer interactions and quickly provide their agents with valuable, timely coaching opportunities within a 24- to 48-hour window, meaning customer service professionals are armed with feedback that’s actionable in-the-moment.

#4: How consistent are your quality reviews?

We all bring our unique perspectives to everything we do, including QA.

The best QA programs, however, offer consistent feedback at the individual level and across the board.

By keeping an eye on your company’s QA calibration score, you’ll be able to ensure your reviewers are consistent with how they’re scoring each question and pinpoint when there are discrepancies between graders.

#5: How holistic is your quality assurance program?

Last, but certainly not least, is evaluating how holistic your quality assurance program is.

If you can’t answer all of  the four questions above, your program is not holistic.

Think about it like this: if your agents are performing at their best and your QA team is sharing feedback that is rich, frequent, fresh, and in-line with team and company standards, your QA scores should continue to soar.

In reality, a great QA program is collaborative. Your agents cannot improve their performance without proper internal review feedback, and simultaneously, your QA scores cannot improve if your agents aren’t enabled to be successful.

Keep in mind that as team members work toward improving their individual performance, you can hit the sweet spot for balancing positive feedback and constructive support when you achieve an ideal praise to criticism ratio of 5:1. That’s important because positive reinforcement is an incredibly powerful motivator that can help drive equally positive results.

How to Improve Your Quality Assurance Program and Increase Customer Loyalty

Ready to step up your QA game?

Get our guide: Doing Contact Center QA the Right Way for the latest best practices on aligning QA to support your company’s strategic goals, leveraging QA to improve agent performance, and harnessing the power of QA to deliver gains in customer loyalty.

Guest post written by: Hannah McCabe, Stella Connect by Medallia, and originally written on  March 29, 2021.

To learn more about ways to build a high-performing customer-centric culture, register for Execs In The Know’s Customer Response Summit, and watch the Stella Connect-led executive panel session, Doing Contact Center Quality Assurance the Right Way, Apr 28, 2021 at 11:15 AM EDT. To attend live or watch on-demand, please register. 

The post How to Measure the Success of Your Quality Assurance Program with Just 5 Questions appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Last week, as a part of our live, virtual event called CustomerCONNECT, we facilitated two Coffee Talk sessions. Essentially, a Coffee Talk session is a live, virtual roundtable discussion designed exclusively for a small group of corporate customer experience (CX) leaders at consumer-facing brands, providing a forum where participants can learn, share, network, and engage to innovate.

In one of the sessions, a group of CX professionals, who also happen to be Quality Assurance (QA) enthusiasts, met to discuss the current state of their QA programs. The conversation covered how brands are managing their QA programs, how QA data is being utilized, and the impact QA is having on the customer experience. Although Coffee Talk sessions are intentionally not recorded to allow for candid discussions, the ideas shared are worth noting.

Here are four key highlights from the discussion:

1. Connecting QA with the Customer Experience

During the discussion, about half of the participants felt their QA programs were directly correlated with, or actively helping to improve the overall customer experience. But the question quickly moved on to what the next evolution might look like for QA programs. On that point, a general consensus surfaced that identified that QA programs need to become more multifaceted by monitoring not only for agent behavior, but also analyzing for things like customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), compliance, and produce actionable business data and insights.

2. Understanding the Customer Experience by Analyzing What Matters Most

Key driver surveys were touched on as an indispensable tool for evaluating how customers are experiencing a particular brand. While some companies spend a lot of time and effort evaluating agent actions (were processes, procedures, and policies properly followed), companies need to ask themselves how important these things are to the customer. A key driver survey can help reframe the very purpose of a QA Program, shifting from something that simply monitors behavior to something that helps an organization tackle pain points, identify root causes, and boost resolution rates. Moreover, key driver surveys provide an analytical approach to capturing what matters most to customers. There’s no guesswork to what matters most to customers – they are telling an organization what matters most in the surveys. The end result — the top 5 or 6 things that matter most to customers should be reflected on the QA scorecard.

3. Scorecard Evolution

Key driver surveys are one way to influence the evolution of QA scorecards, but that’s not the end of the story. The evolution of QA program scorecards was a hot topic of discussion, and it was suggested that soft skills should be the backbone of the form. Ideally, QA scorecards would be adapted to the behaviors we want our agents to exhibit rather than trying to mold agent behavior to an existing scorecard. The point was made that it’s easier to hire based on soft skills and teach hard skills, versus the other way around. By hiring the right people, the QA program scorecard can shift from trying to change undesirable behavior to trying to identify systemic issues that prevent agents from maximizing the strong set of soft skills they were hired for in the first place.

4. Digital Evolution and Applying Automation of Quality Assurance Programs

Like everything else, QA programs must change with the times. Although they are not a hotbed of technology like self-service (think chatbots), there has been some recent innovations. Several participants were exploring ways to automate call evaluations by layering in voice analytics and other artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solutions. Other brands were already using automation on QA data to do things like call type and identify drivers for call duration. This information helps drive sound strategic decisions around things like policy and process. If done right, these insights can help reduce volumes which ultimately helps agents get more efficient and focused on more complex issues.

What This Coffee Talk Session Revealed

QA programs are evolving rapidly, and they have to. In today’s world, more is expected of every business unit and every program, and quality programs are rich with potential. Not only can QA data be used to create a better customer experience within the care organization, but this same approach can be used to reveal opportunities across the wider organization. Reinventing QA programs for a future state will take the right combination of strategy, customer focus, and technology to maximize value.

The post Is Your Quality Assurance Program Working for Your Customers? appeared first on Execs In The Know.

In fact, one of our very own community members, Thomas Siebert., commented in an online discussion about this very topic. Thomas has worked with global brands and outsourcing providers so has experienced first-hand the effectiveness of quality programs from both perspectives:

“Most QA programs I’ve experienced were not effective at driving significant and sustained improvements and were actually set up to fail. This is largely because they were not designed or executed to create an internal quality standard, but were designed over time with extraordinarily complex questions, definitions, scoring, and overall execution. Additionally, most programs I have experienced were not directly tied to company policy and procedure, and seldom could one effectively discern product, process or policy level strengths and weaknesses. Most importantly, these programs were not set up to accurately capture customer pain points. The analytics were also often poor and dangerously conflated customer satisfaction and quality measurement.”

We suspect Siebert is not alone in these challenges. In this article we will explore ways you can re-imagine your quality program immediately to provide your organization with more actionable insights, leading to significant and sustained improvement. We will also provide food for thought about the future of quality as you plan for the long term.

History of ‘Call Centers’ and Quality Monitoring

To set the stage, let’s take a stroll down memory lane.

Graphic Source: EXL Service

It is of no surprise that call centers have dramatically evolved over the years, both in name and function. It was not that long ago that call centers were only handling customer interactions by phone (hence the name) and even some by mail and fax. Next, we saw the introduction of interactive voice response (IVR), email transactions, and then chat. In more recent years, we saw the explosion of multi-channel offerings such as social media, mobile applications, SMS/text, and now artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning/chatbots. In the last few years, omnichannel became the focus with a shift toward greater personalization, more digital/self-help solutions, and advanced analytics.

Quality monitoring has been an integral function within the call center since the beginning and in many ways it has also evolved. However, some would argue it has lagged in approach, sophistication, and value.

We hear that many leaders find themselves in the position of justifying their current quality monitoring programs because it is perceived primarily as a cost of doing business, versus a value-add with a quantifiable return-on-investment (ROI). Who can blame them when, on paper, quality programs can be very costly when you consider:

• Dedicated quality staff (if applicable)
• Monitoring time (if quality monitoring is conducted by supervisors)
• Quality monitoring technology (screen recording, scoring systems, reporting)
• Coaching and feedback time (by quality staff or supervisors)
• Calibration time

This can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and possibly more with global organizations.

Despite the high costs and significant time involved, many organizations experience these five common issues:

1. Quality scores that do not align with reality – high quality scores but low customer satisfaction.
2. Action plans are developed based on quality results, but little to no improvements are achieved.
3. By the time data is collected, analyzed, and presented to leadership, it is outdated.
4. Management and staff do not trust the data or place any priority on it.
5. Results are often perceived as biased and incomplete.

So, considering the high costs of quality programs and some or all these common issues, it is not surprising that many organizations question the value of their programs and often will look there for cost reduction opportunities.

The good news is that quality can absolutely provide a significant ROI free of these concerns. But for many, these programs need to be turned on their head to escape the rut that may be plaguing some legacy approaches.

Seven key areas that will turn your quality program around:
With the evolution of digital channels and omnichannel journeys, it can seem overwhelming to create a holistic quality program that is capable of realistically (and quickly) assessing the customer’s end-to-end journey. Technology plays a role, but you do not have to wait for the latest and greatest technology to make some significant and meaningful changes to your approach. With the increased number of interactions handled in digital channels, you may think your contact center quality program is of less importance, but it is actually the opposite, given that your agents are likely handling the more difficult customer transactions. Your contact center’s quality program provides one of the biggest windows into your customers’ experience and can be a treasure trove of information to your organization. It can tell you not only how your agents are handling customer transactions, but also how your policies and processes are impacting customers. Consider the following changes in approach to get more value out of your current quality program:

1. Focus on business-level results versus agent-level –This is not to say that agent performance is not important because it absolutely is, and you should continue to monitor for agent performance. But, the biggest bang for your buck is to ensure your quality program is structured to assess and capture all issues impacting the customer including process, policy, technology, and content. It is critical to have an accurate picture of performance at the overall business level and you can only do that if your program is set up as such. For example, it is not uncommon that over 75% of reasons issues are not resolved are outside of the agent’s control, yet these are rarely captured via quality monitoring programs. These are the details of greatest importance because they will have a much bigger impact than trying to solve all performance issues via coaching. By migrating to an approach that focuses on business-level results in addition to agent-level, your forms will need to align with that approach with the ability to capture and drill down to all areas impacting performance. Your business-level approach can also be designed to capture incredibly valuable information for other parts of the organization including marketing, product development, and engineering. Additionally, you can capture key customer satisfaction indicators like customer effort and sentiment.
2. Design your forms based on data, not opinions – One of the biggest pitfalls in many quality programs is the form. Everything starts with the form, and forms are often developed over time based on opinion versus data. There is often reasonable rationale why a stakeholder believes an attribute is critical, but when the data is analyzed to validate the importance, organizations find the attribute is not critical. There are many ways to design a form but the most important consideration is to ensure you have solid data as to why an attribute should be included on the form – does it really have a significant impact on the customer or the business? Do you have supporting data to show that? Keep your focus on the attributes that truly have a critical impact.
3. Develop quality metrics that provide an accurate view of performance – There are multiple ways to measure quality and they all have their pros and cons. The key is to ensure your quality metrics can be correlated to other metrics such as customer satisfaction, issue resolution etc. To do this, you may need more than one overall score. For example, to correlate quality to customer satisfaction, you need a distinct “customer quality” score to compare. How you weight your attributes is also important and ties back to the previous point. If you are focused primarily on attributes that you know have a direct and critical impact on performance, then each attribute would be considered critical. If not, ensure you have solid, data-based reasoning for your attribute weightings.
4. Implement a statistically valid sampling approach – Many organizations over-sample at the business level. To establish your business-level sample size, first determine at what level you would like a statistically valid sample. This could be at a line of business level or for a specific contact type or service journey. Then, by using a sample size calculator, you can quickly determine an appropriate sample size based on contact volume, historical defect rate, and desired precision rate. There is usually a “law of diminishing returns” with sample sizes and you reach a point where monitoring more does not greatly improve your precision rates. For business-level sample sizes, the best practice is typically to ensure a random and unbiased approach once you determine your population. But at times you may decide, by design, to sample a more targeted population depending on your objectives. For agent-level sampling, meaning the number of transactions you want to monitor for each agent for coaching purposes, it is difficult to achieve a statistically valid sample at a monthly or even quarterly level. The key is to establish criteria and then monitor low-performing and new agents more frequently. If using agent-level quality results for compensation purposes, be cautious given the low sample sizes as you may need to consider evaluating the data on a rolling basis.
5. Organize your quality team to support your approach – There is no right way to structure a quality organization since it often depends on size, complexity, and scope of the organization. To achieve a completely unbiased, representative, and accurate view of BUSINESS performance, it is often considered best practice for a centralized quality team to conduct business-level evaluations. For agent-level evaluations, some organizations have supervisors conduct these because they are closest to their agents and should be spending a significant amount of time with agents anyway. Other organizations will have team quality agents or coaches conducting these. The most important thing to consider is to have a defined organizational structure to accomplish your objective for both business and agent-level monitoring.
6. Develop a robust calibration approach – Calibration among quality evaluators is one of the most important components of a quality program, yet it is often one of the most challenging. It can be time consuming, difficult to measure, and cumbersome to manage. Often, quality organizations will schedule calibration sessions which consist of a meeting in which quality evaluators listen to a call or review a transaction, score it together, and then discuss it. This is not calibration. Best practice is to assign a Gauge (or the “expert”) who scores selected transactions and then require each quality evaluator to score the transaction independently. All evaluator scores are compared to the Gauge and results are then measured at the overall, evaluator, and attribute levels. Any evaluators under a certain threshold should be calibrated until they meet minimum requirements. If any attributes are scored incorrectly by multiple evaluators, that could indicate a broad scoring issue and that would warrant a meeting. The good news is that you do not necessarily need to have a meeting every time you want to calibrate – only when there are specific scoring inconsistencies that need to be addressed. This does require the ability to measure and quantify calibration accuracy for each session, and over time at the evaluator and attribute level. Once this is in place it will save time and money, while most importantly ensuring scoring accuracy and consistency.
7. Implement a structured reporting and performance improvement process – Last, but certainly not least, once you make these changes you will have incredibly valuable business-level data which will guide your organization to changes that will have a significant impact. What you do with this data is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. You must have a structure and approach to analyze the data, compare it to external metrics (such as customer satisfaction), consume it, and develop action plans to improve the areas that will have the greatest impact. There is no right approach, but most importantly ensure that you have the right team, resources, cadence, and closed-loop approach to deliver value and improvements.

Food for Thought: The Future of Quality

Above are some changes you can make immediately to your current quality program, regardless of where you are with your technology capabilities. Even with the potential of more sophisticated automation, these approaches allow you to build a solid quality program foundation for any solution you implement, now or in the future. The future is exciting with technology solutions evolving daily to further enhance and optimize quality programs.

So, as you develop your long-term quality strategy, particularly with a larger work-at-home (WAH) workforce and more complex customer journeys across both digital and live channels, technology solutions that support your strategy will come into play if they haven’t already. Keep in mind that some of these solutions may not be as mature or widely used yet in the quality space, but the landscape is changing quickly and should at least be understood as you continue to transform your quality program. Most notably is the use of AI. AI adoption continues to increase in the support of both customers and agents. It is quickly becoming a technology utilized for quality management and analytics.

As customer journeys become more complex and we have a more disbursed workforce, quality monitoring also becomes more complex, with the added difficulty of pulling data from multiple sources in real-time. Rana Gujral, CEO of Behavior Signals, explains in an article published on www.tdwi.org and titled How AI is Transforming Call Centers with Actionable Insights, “AI improves this situation by performing those basic functions (monitoring, analysis, and support) in real-time and at scale. Every call is monitored and recorded. Speech patterns are analyzed to determine the mood and response of both the customer and the agent on each call. The outcome is recorded and compared against the actions taken by the agent on the call. Much of this data can be delivered in real-time to the customer service agent, enabling them to respond in the most effective way. It also ensures that customers are matched with the right agent much faster.”

Real-time, customer sentiment, and predictive analytics can also be driven by AI. As discussed above, it is becoming more challenging, with human resources alone, to capture all interactions across all channels and identify the issues the customer experienced. Gujral explains that with AI, “This data can be captured and integrated into a single profile, enabling rapid assignment of the correct customer service agent who can proactively address their problem before it escalates.” Additionally, he explains that AI can capture specific data points related to customers’ vocal characteristics, call history, nature of their issue, and agent response to flag a potential issue and intervene more quickly.
In short, AI-modeling solutions can consume more data from multiple sources across the entire customer journey. This combined with the ability to interpret the customer’s sentiment and agents’ more subjective behaviors could lead to more objective insights with less bias and human effort.

Key Takeaway:

You can turn your quality program from a process perceived as a “cost of doing business” to a value-add to the entire organization. The biggest bang for your buck is ensuring you have a business-level approach that allows you to capture all issues impacting the customer and the business, including process, product, and policy deficiencies. There are cutting-edge technology trends in quality, specifically with AI and analytics, but a solid quality framework and foundation is essential regardless of the technology deployed. Technology solutions should be implemented to support and enhance your quality program, improving efficiencies and insights, but one does not exist without the other.
Bottom line – do not be afraid to shake up your quality program. It can be one of the greatest assets to the entire organization if it is designed and executed effectively.

We would love to hear from you if you have taken steps to transform your quality program. There is no perfect solution and we know our members would like to hear success stories and best practices regarding this topic that resonates with so many.

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